‘Capturing Craigavon’ is a community-based project that aims to explore and document the history of the New Town of Craigavon, charting the events, stories and implications of its founding, from its conception in the 1960s, through the decline of the 1980s and 90s and on to the renewal of the 2000s up to the present day.

Capturing Craigavon started because a small group of residents felt that they had something to say about where they live. They are a group of people who moved here as young families in the late 1960s and early 70s and stayed, many of them as active members of their community who have both shaped and been shaped by Craigavon over the last 50 years.

They wanted a project that would capture their memories, feeling strongly that they had lived through interesting times and had stories to tell that others wanted to hear. But, there is much more to Capturing Craigavon than that. Craigavon has been a greatly misunderstood place. It is unlike anywhere else in Northern Ireland. Not a town in the traditional sense of the word, it was imagined by its architects as the city of the future. From the vantage point of today, that future - with its high rise apartment buildings, 3-day working weeks, and water taxis, looks a little far-fetched. The ambition for Craigavon was so great, and so fanciful, that it is not difficult to see its reality as falling short somehow.

There were also events and social changes early on that the planners could never have foreseen that disrupted Craigavon’s trajectory. The social unrest and economic decline that devastated Northern Ireland in the 1970s through to the mid-1990s hit Craigavon particularly hard. As a new town, without a long historical context of its own, it became indelibly connected with the problems of that time, and for many people not from here, those associations have held firm through the years.

Capturing Craigavon is not just a local history project; it is an effort to set the record straight, to draw attention to the reality of life in Craigavon, and to celebrate the perseverance and community spirit of the people who held on.

What is new and exciting about Capturing Craigavon is that it both documents and cultivates a sense of place - that hard-to-define quality where place and personal identity are intertwined. Sense of place is the foundation of the affection and belonging that people associate with where they live. It comes about through lots of different factors, like local architectural style, shared history, and strong family or community ties. In 1965, when Craigavon was founded, none of those aspects of place existed yet. Instead, they emerged over many years, as people put down roots, raised families, forged friendships and, in the face of adversity, began advocating for their communities.

One of the primary factors for a strong sense of place is feeling represented in how your place is perceived. Negative perceptions from outside can be incredibly damaging to personal identities, even when they do not reflect the reality. In designing this project, we saw a need not only to excavate local stories of place, but to share and celebrate them to a wider audience. We knew that the project had to be participatory, involving residents of all ages in as hands-on a way as possible, and we wanted its outputs to be the kind of things that people would enjoy.

The project has had two strands over the last year. The first has been the research. We focused on a single methodology to achieve our results - oral history. Oral history is the recording of people’s memories and experiences. It is a way of preserving historical information that often gets hidden from ‘formal’ histories, because it is not routinely written into historical records. Oral history is a powerful way of experiencing a place from the perspective of other people, because their life stories are often so tied up with that place.

Working closely with Southern Regional College, we developed a course that would give local residents the skills they needed to become historians of their own area, to be able to find and record the memories and experiences of themselves, their families, and their neighbours. Six residents took part in the course, and they now form the core of the Capturing Craigavon research team. Over the past year, we have recorded 26 oral histories with residents of all ages, and most of them are reproduced here in this collection.

The second strand of Capturing Craigavon was the programme - a year of events, workshops, and resource-building to make all of this public, fun, and accessible. We started 2016 with the development of our online home (capturingcraigavon.com), the repository for all of the stories we have gathered so far, and will continue to collect in the future. It houses old documents from the days of the Craigavon Development Commission, photographs from the archives, commissioned writings about Craigavon, contemporary photography, and oral history recordings captured by the research team.

It is also home to the four popular short films we made throughout the year, ranging in themes from a snapshot of the annual ‘Fun Day at the Lakes’ event, a personal musical odyssey through Craigavon in the 1980s, to an intimate look at what it’s like for some local young people to grow up here.

All through the year, we put on events to bring people together and celebrate life in Craigavon. It kicked off in March 2016, with an event in the Hub that recognised the incredible multiculturalism of Craigavon through food, music and dance. Brownlow Library hosted us through the summer for four monthly film nights, where we screened documentaries that explored 20th Century design and cities, from St Louis, Missouri, to Basildon in England. We curated an audio-visual exhibition in a 1970s community hall at Drumgor Heights. The programme culminated in September, with ‘Craigavon Picnic’, a huge outdoor spectacle in Moyraverty, with children’s activities, live music, and free food.

Three new publications mark the closing of this first stage of Capturing Craigavon. They tell the story, or at least part of the story, of Craigavon. Over the past year, it has become obvious that stories of place are unending, but this collection goes some way towards addressing the imbalance to date of who speaks of and for Craigavon.

The project is managed by PLACE on behalf of Brownlow Festival Committee, with support from ABC Council’s Arts Development and Community Development Teams, and Southern Regional College.